she didn’t let her tell her that she loved her . . .

Mary Cappello is a queer practitioner of the essay who experiments in prose, memoir, literary nonfiction, and performative criticism. Her seven books include a detour on awkwardness, a breast cancer anti-chronicle, a lyric biography, and the mood fantasia Life Breaks In (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Her most recent book, Lecture, a speculative manifesto on the lost arts of the lecture, the notebook, and the nap, inaugurated Transit Books’ Undelivered Lecture Series. Hew new book, Frost Will Come/essays from the bardo, on bearing sacred witness to her poet-mother’s last days, appears this October 2026, from the University of Wisconsin Press. A former Guggenheim and Berlin Prize Fellow, she is professor emerita of English and creative writing at the University of Rhode Island. More at marycappello.com. (updated 10/2026)